Acquisition Research Of Thai Students On Chinese Approximate Number

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is a young displine, which only has about 50 years history form the mid of 1960’s. And Learning Chinese as a Second Language must be much younger than SLA, therefore, there is much left for us to study on this field. Chinese approximate number is the very common expression method of numerals in daily life. Some of these expressions such as "Duo", "Lai", and "Ba" etc., each of them has different positions in different structures, and other numerals, quantifiers, and even nouns of these structures are also limited. In addition, based on our survey on Thai students’Chinese level, we find that "Chinese Approximate Number" is really a difficult language points for them. And till now, we haven’t found more study on Chinese approximate number from the aspect of language acquisition, and we do believe this study will contribute to Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.This paper here studys the acquisition of Thai students on Chinese approximate numbers from the aspect of SLA. Firstly, we contrast and analyze the approximate numbers both of Thai and Chinese, and predict the difficult items according to Clifford Prator’s theory. Secondly, in order to verify our hypothesis, we design and send questioniers to Thai students, and the feedbacks show us the real difficult items and the order of the difficulty items. Then, we analyze the results and errors, and find "forgeting", "inter-transfer of Thai grammar", "over-generalization of Chinese grammar" and some uncorrect learning strategies must be the reasons why Thai students using the target language in wrong ways. All the above factors lead Thai students to "fossilization" during Chinese acquisition. Based on the investigation and analyzation, we point out some suggestions to editors of students’books and teachers:"repeatition" is much more important in teaching; teachers should be more avtive to arouse students’attention in class and teaching students more learning strategies to monitor themselves might be the most important thing to do.